Posts Tagged ‘Remote Desktop’

I run Hyper-V virtual machines (VM’s). I copy and paste using the clipboard between the host and VM’s, and between the VM’s themselves. A lot. So it is truly annoying when the clipboard doesn’t work. And no, it doesn’t work if you simply do what comes naturally — find the VM in the built-in Hyper-V Manager, right click, and select Connect.

This opens a window of your VM, using “Virtual Machine Connection”. But this window doesn’t support the clipboard, nor any of the following: redirected audio, drives, or printers. There is something new called Enhanced Session Mode which does support them, but only if the client OS is Windows 8.1 Enterprise or Windows Server 2012. I don’t know about you, but those aren’t the OS’s I typically put into my VM’s. So this would seem to be a worthless feature.

Thankfully, there is an easy alternative. Just use the Remote Desktop Connection application (connecting to other computers via Remote Desktop), which is built into all Windows. Remote Desktop has for years supported all of the missing clipboard and redirection of client resources such as printers.

[Caveat] Again related to the client OS running in the VM – the client OS needs to support “being a Remote Desktop host” (being connected to via Remote Desktop). For example, Windows 7 Home Premium does not support this, but Windows 7 Professional/Ultimate does.

[Setup] You will need to enable Remote Desktop in the client OS and know the client’s Computer Name in order to connect to it.

Short wish: One of the things missing from Remote Desktop that VMware Workstation has is dragging the client desktop window to resize it, and then the client “hardware” display settings are changed so that it matches the new window size. The client remains optimally sized, as intended.